Bib: Failed to parse file, where month equals Sep--Oct

[LasseRosenow]

Description

I have the following bibtex file:

@article{asdf,
  author = {Meg},
  title = {{Test}},
  journal   = {Computer Communications},
  volume    = {36},
  year      = {2013},
  month     = {Sep--Oct},
}

But it results in the following error:

Failed to parse BibLaTeX file (test.bib:1: invalid number)

This is caused by the month field:

@article{asdf,
  month     = {Sep--Oct},
}

I am using a large bibtex library, that is maintained by a research group of my university.
The problem is, that this library has many entries that write the month like above.
Which causes me not to be able to use typst, except I find all the affected bib entries.

Reproduction URL

No response

Operating system

Linux

Typst version

• I am using the latest version of Typst

[DerDrodt]

BibLaTeX does not support month ranges like you have used here, and for bibtex, I cannot find anything about it neither.

What is your expected behavior? What should the output be?

[LasseRosenow]

To be honest those bibtex entries are not created by me, nor used by me. If it comes to it I would be fine if typst would just ignore their incorrect month field.

For me personally it is just a problem, because the research group I am working for, is providing a huge bibtex library that I am obligated to use and there are a few entries like this.
These entries are not used by me and probably incorrect, but finding them all and fixing them is to much effort for me personally.

I could have a check later how latex handles these. But I can say that at least it would ignore them since my projects in latex work just fine even when including the bib library.

[LasseRosenow]

Apart form this I also want to add that the error message reported by typst is totally useless.

To find what was actually wrong I needed to go through my massive bib file and keep deleting entries until it compiled.

I generally find this to be a problem with typst. Are there any plans to improve the typst error to actually report at the places where the error originate from and by also giving more useful information than this cryptic "line 1 and invalid number" I don't see why there is an invalid number and I also don't think that is line 1.

[laurmaedje]

@LasseRosenow There is no need to become offensive. The error messages for biblatex files aren't great yet because (a) the biblatex crate doesn't produce ideal error messages yet, and (b) there is no infrastructure to annotate errors in non-Typst files. All of these things take time to implement.

[LasseRosenow]

Actually when writing my last post I didn't intend to be offensive at all. I am very sorry that this was received differently than intended.

Maybe the terms totally useless sound a bit hard, but I think it is exactly what I felt this error message is after I was searching for the problem for a very long time. In the end for me these words felt like they would fit the most.

But that doesn't mean, that I expect typst to give me super perfect error messages etc. especially considering how young this project is.

I only intended to share this information without any further implications.

But I think it is worth mentioning issues if I discover them. Especially since I had this problem on other areas of typst as well. So I am just hoping this is something to be improved in the future.

[LasseRosenow]

The error messages for biblatex files aren't great yet because (a) the biblatex crate doesn't produce ideal error messages yet

Ah I see that is reasonable I better open an issue in their repository then if not already.

Thanks for clarifying :)

[laurmaedje]

Closing in favor of typst/biblatex#47

[RonaldAJ]

Just reproduced with the following bibtex:

`@Article{Pineda1997,
Title = {Bang, click, thud, or whack?},
Author = {Pineda, FJ and Cauwenberghs, G and Edwards, RT and Ryals, KT and Steigerwald, DG},
Journal = {JOHNS HOPKINS APL TECHNICAL DIGEST},
Year = {1997},

Month = {APR-JUN},
Number = {2},
Pages = {244-253},
Volume = {18},

ISSN = {0270-5214},
Owner = {elburg},
Times-cited = {1},
Unique-id = {ISI:A1997WU25900011}
}
`

The use of two months separated by a '-' is important, without that it works as expected.

[RonaldAJ]

Using "4-6" instead of "APR-JUN" is not problematic.

[RonaldAJ]

@laurmaedje Is this minimal enough to reinvestigate? I found the problem using https://typst.app.

[laurmaedje]

As @DerDrodt mentioned, month ranges are fundamentally not supported by the format, so I don't think there's anything we can do.

[RonaldAJ]

Thanks! I also see now that JabRef calls these fields deprecated. So I guess the best option is to remove them.